


Homecoming

by SilverWallflower



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-03
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-23 11:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11988483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverWallflower/pseuds/SilverWallflower
Summary: A clone of the 10th Doctor, Jenny Twohearts is a Gallefreyan. She would be a Time Lord if she had a TARDIS, but only one survived the Time War. But is that true? Jenny follows a signal only she can hear to the frontier planet of Homecoming, and makes a connection that changes her life.





	Homecoming

Homecoming

I

My sisters flamed across the cold of space like comets, to wink out in an implosion of metal and love.

I fell. I was wounded, too wounded to help my companion, the golden breath I shared with them not enough, not enough to sustain them. Two hearts beat, slower and slower, until they stopped and I was alone.

I called. I called for my sisters across the matrix that my companion called the time vortex, but none answered. None answered. I believe that my sisters are dead now, all dead save me.

I am alone. I miss my companion. I miss their analysis, their strategy, their love of testing oneself against an adversary, the triumph of winning, and the thrill and joy of being bested and learning from that besting. I miss my companion moving us through the wherewhen with the glee of a child moving a marker on a game board.

I am alone, but still I call, because I do not want to believe that both our races are dead.

And now comes somoeone who hears my call.

 

 

Relic Peaks

Jenny Twohearts loosened her custom-made knife in its sheath. She hadn’t been surprised to hear voices here on the rough trail leading to the waterfall; she was surprised to recognize them. Her first assumption had been she was approaching a pair of patrolling relic cops. She’d come across them before a few times in the time she had been here. It was never a problem; her relic-hunter license was in order. These weren’t cops, though, and there were three, not two, voices from her past. She didn’t know why they would be here, but she didn’t think it could be good.

She held her ground as the three male voices got louder. Ryner came around the corner first and stopped, one hand going to his holster. Behind him, Raze stumbled to a halt and Jarth dropped into parade rest.

Ryner said, “What are you doing up here, Twohearts? You working for the Alliance?”

Bethany Falls made a steady low-pitched acoustic backdrop beyond them, plunging down the green-gray cliff base into the Teagan River. She looked at Ryner without blinking, watching the alternatives ripple out from him. They fought/she wounded Ryner/Ryner wounded her/both wounded/ no one wounded/ Ryner dead/Ryner feinted and wounded Jarth/Ryner feinted and Raze shot Ryner in error/no one fought. In no alternative did she die on this mountain.

All her life, possible outcomes had played out in front of her like this, but since she’d come to the Relic Peaks there had been many more, stretching out far beyond the current situation. Even now, her senses sharpened to danger, she saw Ryner dead under a double sun/Ryner drunk in a rundown bar/Ryner on trial/Ryner laughing, swinging up a dark-haired tot/Ryner in cryo/Ryner, stout and stiff, dancing with a silver-haired woman. The images nearly overwhelmed her. She forced herself not to shake her head, forced herself to ignore the multitude of alternatives spilling off Jarth and Raze as well.

“I’m not a solder anymore, remember?” she said.

He snorted. “You were born a soldier.” Jenny didn’t answer. That was truer than Ryner knew.

He hadn’t changed much in the last twelve months since she had last worked for him.  Raze and Jarth were in civilian clothes but Ryner wore a silvery tunic over trousers of the same color, and his pale hair was shaved to a stubble. Hair didn’t matter anymore, with battle suits, and Jenny had never bothered her cut her own blond hair, but Ryner affected this look. It was what civilians thought soldiers looked like.

“I’m a civilian now,” she said.

He didn’t move his hand away from his weapon. Neither did she.

She glanced past him. “How you boys doing?”

“Good,” said Jarth, but Raze glared without answering.

“I thought you were getting out, Jar,” she said.

He shrugged. “I was. Things change.”

“Twohearts a civvie,” Ryner said. “Who’da thought? Just out for a hike up to the waterfall? Or are you in the relic game now?”

“Could be,” she said.

“Most relic-hunters have moved east,” he said. “This area’s picked clean.”

She waited without responding.

“There was a border beacon posted here,” he said, “and it’s gone now. Any idea what might have happened?”

“You must have it wrong, Ry,” she said. “There wouldn’t be a border beacon on this side of the river. Unless someone was trying to make it look like a relic was found in Octus territory when it was really in the Alliance.”

“Don’t play with me, Twohearts,” he said.

“I’m not playing at anything,” she said.

“It’d be better if you moved on, headed east with the others.”

“I’ve got no plans to leave,” she said.

“Suit yourself, then,” he said, managing to make it sound like a threat.

They made their way around her. She pivoted so that they never got behind her.

“Jarth,” she said when they were past here. “What changed?”

He shrugged without looking back. “Bad investments.”

 “Shut up, Jar,” Ryner said. Jarth shut up.

She watched them go down the trail. Now she knew who had planted that beacon, and had disabled the legal one.  She just didn’t know why.

She continued up the mountain to the waterfall.

*

She’d been a mercenary for ten years. Her fellow soldiers thought she was in her late twenties, maybe thirty. They couldn’t know that before she’d left her home world, come out into the galaxy, she had only been alive for three days.

 _You are just a soldier_ , her father had said, and she remembered the disgust in his eyes. _We were so much more._ She had thought she could be more, too, but once she visited other worlds, she learned she was mainly good for soldiering. And there was always a need for soldiers, especially ground-pounders like her. You could have battles in space forever, but ultimately someone needed to secure the land, and that was where she came in.

Since she’d left her home-world she had heard a homing signal, one that showed up on no instruments, one that no one heard but her. It had taken her ten years to close in. She hadn’t liked Ryner when she first signed on to his company a few years earlier, and she’d left after three tours, but when she found out he was going to Iolanthe, where an intercontinental dispute was in its sixth year, she knew signing back up with him was the easiest way to get into the system where the signal seemed to originate. Ryner didn’t like her any more than she liked him, but he knew her worth and he’d signed her up without a blink.

The signal didn’t originate on Iolanthe. When her contract expired, she cashed out, caught a freighter to this world. It had taken her eight planetary months, working her way across the continent, to home in on its origin, which was somewhere in these mountains. She had been searching for ten weeks.

Homecoming, they’d named the planet. They called the town she was staying in Crossroads, because the North Alliance Highway crossed the river.  They called the broad lush valley cupped by mountains Mist Valley and the broad river that bisected it Big River. The citizens of Alliance named their capital city, about a hundred galsteps to the south, Capital. Jenny liked the names. They were simple. They called the mountains the Relic Peaks, and that described exactly what they were. Something had happened here, a long time ago, a thing that left scattered artifacts and remnants of tech buried and half-buried throughout the mountains. The relic game was still a booming business. Jenny had registered with one of the Alliance’s fifteen relics clerks in Crossroads and gotten the token that let her collect and sell certain savaged artifacts. The clerk, Thessalim Horne, was also her landlord.

The token she wore registered every artifact she touched, at least theoretically, and gave its location relative to the nearest border beacon. The Alliance charged relic hunters a fee for each item they recovered, unlike Octus to the north, where the Primatio, the country’s sole leader, confiscated and examined everything. About half the time, they said, he gave things back, but the rest he kept with no compensation to the prospector.

She made her way up the trail to Bethany Falls, where water flooded over the worn cliff face and pounded into a deep bluish-green pool, then flowed into the Teagan, the east-west border between the Alliance and Octus. Here. The signal was somewhere near. She had salvaged two odd pieces of equipment from the ground near here, items Horne said he’d never seen before. But there was something else here, she knew it. She searched, but found only a few scraps of metal, marked with concentric circles, crescents and multiple lines.

*

Between calls, I rest. It has been so long since I have fed, since I have even felt the warmth of a sun, any sun. Between calls I rest, and my rests grow longer and longer, and when I wake, for a period I do not know my place in the wherewhen.  I would have starved, faded, except for the multi-lobed awareness above me, whose network sends energy deep into the earth where I lie, whose information tendrils carry nourishment to me,  even as it partakes of the water in which I lie. This awareness, like me, drinks the energy of the sun. It shares only a little, but that is enough.

*

The shadows of the buildings of Crossroads reached across the grain fields toward the eastern mountains. Jenny looked down at the town. Three high arched bridges crossed the river. She had worked security on the river barges to get here, saving the final galactic credits from her cash-out, earning Alliance rayals to meet her needs, and getting the lay of the land, or more specifically, the water. Crossroads had farms and ranches, and there was still a small boat-building and repair industry, but much of its money came from the relic trade. When Jenny had first come up Big River, she’d carried on north and visited Octus and its capital city of Linn. Linn was shiny and clean, with uniformed police and soldiers who marched around the city at regular intervals. She hadn’t liked it much.

She tried to ignore the faint affection she felt for Crossroads and its valley. She was only here to figure out this signal, this thing that called to her. It seemed like it must be a relic, an artifact, but why was she the only one who could hear it?

Her skimmer waited where she had left it, securely yoked to a krya tree. The tree’s trunk, its bark a glossy, deep brown, was so wide that it would have taken three Jennys to join hands around it. The canopy spread in a near-perfect circle, as wide as a small house, the spade-shaped leaves directing rain water down the bark onto the roots. It was spring and the soft spines at the tips of the leaves smelled like a spice called cinnamon. Jenny’d seen other krya trees on her trip across the continent, but none as big as these, with bark and leaves as glossy. Horne told her that the trees were five centuries old. Once in a while, one fell, and the lumber from it had been prized, a hundred years ago, for boat-making. The locals almost never cut down a tree, he said. He didn’t really know why. No one talked about it, it just didn’t seem right somehow. The sap that oozed from the leaf tips in late summer was collected and distilled to make an antimicrobial healing salve that they sold everywhere on the continent.

She unlocked the skimmer and loaded her meager findings into the twin cargo bags that hung behind the seat. The krya lived side by side with some imported trees, tall slender spikes, with dark green needle instead of leaves, and the mixtures of scents was strange but pleasant. She climbed onto the skimmer and started it up.

All the soldiers in Jenny’s platoon in Ryner’s Free Force had talked about what they would do when they got out. Jarth, who’d modified every practically battle suit in the company and would do custom work for a price, wanted to start an armoring and weapons business. Some wanted star-ships, some wanted farms. Jenny had not imagined any of those things. She didn’t know how to be anything except a fighter. Until the signal, she had never had any idea of what she would do if she weren’t fighting. Looking down at the town of Crossroads, she thought for the first time that it would be nice to have a place to always come back to.

Thessalim Horne had a two-story building at the north end of town, that had once been part of a shipyard. Even now a slim riverboat hung in a large sling alongside the place. Horne was a descendant of the original Homecoming settlers. His grandmother had been part of the River Police before diplomacy and overhead flyers had reduced piracy. His father had built boats. The slim elegant boat in the sling, its length matching that of the house, was one of the last of the river police boats, decommissioned a generation ago. Jenny loved the sleek shape of it, the high bridge, the pointed prow. It wasn’t like the broad, flat boats she’d guarded up and down the river. Its lines were those of an elegant weapon, although Jenny would be the first to admit that most things looked like weapons to her.

Horne had given her a tour of the boat a few weeks ago. It was a true rarity, he said, made of a single fallen krya tree. “It’s a museum piece, but I’m restoring it,” he said. The boat was light and fast, and the wood was so strong that the hull only needed light armoring near the engines. He’d taken care of that. The deck bounced and creaked a bit, and that was his next big project. Then he would refurbish the cabins, the hold and the bridge, which needed new instruments.

“I’d love to have her river-worthy again,” he said. They had been eating dinner in the ground floor room of his house, which he had turned into a public room. “But that would cost a sackful of rayals, so I just work on it a bit at a time when I can.”

Jenny speared a piece of fruit. She had fallen into the habit of these dinner, or a glass of tizel when she came back from prospecting. Horne was easy to talk to, interesting to listen to, and he knew a lot about Mist Valley, and about artifacts. She thought he liked her, even though he still, after weeks, called her “Ser Twohearts,” instead of just Twohearts, or Jenny.

“Is that what you’d do if you had money?” she said. “Build boats?”

He nodded, chewing.

“I thought the barges were mostly composite now, and the big shipyards had moved to Capital.”

He said, “I don’t want to build barges. I want to build boats like Gran’s.”

“Elegant boats,” she said.

His eyes reflected all the light in the room for a moment. “I’d build elegant boats,” he said.

 “Horne,” she called now as she entered the ground floor room. Two large windows opened onto Waterfront Road, letting light into an open dining area, and a hallway led to a small kitchen, lavatory and the door that opened into the broad alley behind the house. Beyond the curving counter another door led into Horne’s office, which, befitting a relics clerk, held a safe and a reinforced door. She knew there was another door to the outside in the office and that Horne kept it locked.

“Be right there,” he said. A few seconds later he emerged from the office, a scanner in his hand.

He was a tall wisp of a man, his skin two shades lighter than the trunks of the krya trees, with hands and a nose he hadn’t grown into yet, although he had to be in his thirties. His eyes were dark and he wore his brown hair queued back in an old style that suited him, as did his traditional clothing; soft rust-colored trousers, a dark green shirt and a tight vest heavily embroidered in reds, browns and golds.

He rented out two rooms upstairs; he served tizel and meals in the ground floor room, and drew a stipend from the Alliance Relics Commission by acting as one of the local clerks. He worked as a deputy lawkeeper when the force was short-handed, and once in a while he repaired boats for cash, because he liked it.

“Good hunting today?”

Jenny set the cargo bags on the floor. “I’ll let you decide,” she said, opening the closest and taking out the shards of metal and two tiny machines, all inscribed with the circles within circles, crescents and multiple lines.

“Those are nice,” Horne said as he scanned each one.

“Horne, is the Alliance having border problems?”

He spread both his hands in a Homecoming shrug. “A little more than usual. Some piracy, on both sides of the border. We’ve had two boats scuttled, and Octus said two farms were burned. Octus blames us, but then they always do. They’re not an easy neighbor.”

“Where are the attacks coming from?”

“Well that’s the problem. We think they’re coming over the border from Octus, but Octus insists they’ve got a base in the Alliance. Me, I think they’re holed up somewhere on the Teagan River, maybe up one of the small tributaries under the trees where flyers won’t spot them.”

“The Teagan is the border, right?”

He nodded. “Why, you run into trouble?”

“Not exactly.” She knew the public room was empty but she quickly scanned it again anyway. “I ran into some former friends. And I found this.” She pulled out the counterfeit border beacon. She had taken care to disable the emergency signal, and the thing was dead, but Horne gulped when he saw it. “I don’t think it’s a relic,” she said.

“That’s not one of ours,” he said. “Where’d you find it?”

“On the south side of the Teagan, on the approach to Bethany Falls,” she said. “At first I thought it might be a relic.” That wasn’t exactly true; she’d hoped it was the source of the signal.

Horne reset his scanner and scanned the hexagonal beacon thoroughly. It was about as big as Jenny’s fist. He went over it several times, turned it over so different faces showed, leaned in to study the seams and joins. “I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s an Octus beacon and its geo-loc is definitely in Alliance territory.”

“So the relics I found today, up by the waterfall, on the south side… if this had been working, they would have registered as—“

“As Octus relics, yes. This will need to go into the safe,” he said, and she knew he wasn’t asking permission. She nodded.

He took away the beacon and Jenny guessed that he made a call to the capital, too. He seemed more relaxed when he came back. “That’s going to end up being evidence in an international dispute,” he told her. “Don’t count on getting it back.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Good. How about a tizel?” He poured her a glass of the warm purple liquid before she even nodded. “And tell me about these former friends.”

“Elikin Ryner runs a mercenary company called the Free Force. I contracted with him a couple of times.”

“Soldiers. Mercenaries.”

“The Free Force is a full-service operation. They can do surveillance, intelligence gathering, peacekeeping, tactical, security, asymmetrical warfare, insurgency and counter-insurgency. Impersonating pirates would not be a reach, but why? What does Octus want?”

Horne poured a glass for himself. On the wall above the bar, a figurine of the Lady, robed, holding a pitcher in one hand and a sword in the other, looked down at them. “I can guess,” he said, and with his free hand he waved at the scattering of small relics on the counter.

“That’s not very logical,” Jenny said. She took a grateful sip of the warm beverage. Warming the concoction of lightly fermented local berries increased the stimulative properties of the drink. People drank it all day long, and Jenny was beginning to understand why. “People keep telling me the Teagan zone is played out.”

“But you’re up there,” he pointed out. “You haven’t moved east.”

She gave him a two-handed shrug.

Horne said, “In addition to everything else that’s weird about him, Primatio LeDuque of Octus is a history buff. He’s obsessed with the Time War. And Time War relics.”

When she’d been in Linn she’d read news snips about the Primatio. He _was_ obsessed with relics, for reasons she hadn’t understood then and still didn’t. Unfortunately for him, the boundaries that had been drawn two centuries earlier meant the bulk of the relics were in the  Alliance. “What’s the Time War?”

Horne laughed. “Oh, come on. It’s been the stuff of bedtime stories for generations.”

“I never had bedtime stories.”

“Oh.” He took another sip. “I’m sorry to hear that. About the Time War… well, here’s how Gran always told it.”

*

Long ago, maybe, there were two great spacefaring races, powerful, advanced far beyond what we can imagine, even now.

One race let their biological bodies atrophy and lived life in robotic carapaces. They purged from their lives any tender emotions. Joy, love, compassion, these were forbidden, and as they embarked on conquest, determined to remake the universe in their own image, they exterminated any race that could not completely conform. They called themselves the Daleks.

The other race inhabited the megaplanet Gallifrey. An elite of their population called themselves Time Lords and it was said that they had ships that traversed the time vortex and could travel in time as well as in space. The Time Lords were like magicians; they could travel to any point in time and any point in any known universe. They were selfish and arrogant, but they believed in freedom, and despised the Dalek view of life. Soon they and the Daleks were at war. Various reasons are given as the cause and catalyst of this war, but no one really knows what started it.

We know that hundreds of planets with millions of inhabitants were destroyed as the two races warred, the Daleks with Deathsmiths, the Time Lords with N-forms and ships that could deploy black holes. Millions of beings. Collateral damage, they call it. We know that this system was the site of an epic battle that raged in the space around Homecoming. Dalek ships and time ships fell from the sky and rained down on the planet. On this continent, Mist Valley was the location of most of that wreckage.

Despite their power, the Time Lords faltered and the Dalek army surrounded their home world, prepared to vaporize it. The Time Lords instead destroyed their planet, taking with them into oblivion the entire Dalek fleet… some say the entire Dalek race. In a picosecond, two great and terrible races perished. Some say the Daleks still exist, and others, that Time Lords still roam the universe, but no one living has ever seen either.

*

Jenny took another swallow. “Daleks still pop up from time to time,” she said.

“Really? What are they like?”

“Hard to kill.” Her mind had already drifted. _You are only a soldier_ , he had said. _We were so much more_. And he had looked at her with disgust. She brought her mind back to the present. “I haven’t found any Dalek tech,” she said.

“It’d be illegal to sell if you did,” he said. “The Planetary Relic Agency would confiscate and destroy it. Daleks probably keep popping up, as you put it, because stupid people keep bolting them together and giving them a power charge.”

“So if it’s not Dalek tech, what’s Octus after?”

“Rumor is, and this is _only_ rumor, that Primatio LeDuque believes that one of the Time Lord’s ships crashed into Relic Peak and is buried somewhere on the mountain.”

“An intact ship? Someone would have found it by now,” she said. “People have been scavenging these mountains since you settled here, right? How long ago _was_ the war, anyway?”

He shrugged. “No one knows. A thousand years ago, or five hundred, or a hundred. Or it hasn’t happened yet.” He caught her flat stare. “That’s a Time War joke.”

She nodded. “I see how it’s supposed to be funny. But a ship wouldn’t still be intact after five hundred years.”

He looked away. After a second, he poured a little more tizel into her glass, and topped off his own. “Their ships… rumor, again, but some people think they might have been sentient.”

“Sentient ships. I wish I had a gal-credit for every time I’ve heard a story about a sentient ship,” she said. “They make good entertainment, but still, how could it be alive?”

“A thousand years might not be so long to an entity that moves through the time vortex,” he said.

“It still has to have a power source,” she said, “and fuel.” She realized she was hoping the signal, the beacon, _was_ from a time ship, and that it might be alive. Except, what then? What would she do with a time ship? Sell it to the Primatio, maybe. Otherwise, what? “If someone did find it, you know, hypothetically, what would happen? Would the Alliance confiscate it? I mean, a time ship would be far more dangerous than a Dalek headpiece.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s never come up. Time ships aren’t even in the catalogue of relics, or in the procedural manual.”

She pushed her glass across the bar and shook her head when he raised his eyebrows. “What does it look like, the time ship? Is it a blue rectangular structure?”

“What? A blue…? No. I don’t know. No one knows. No one who’s alive has seen one, at least not on Homecoming. There might be one in a museum somewhere.”

She nodded. “Thanks for the tizel.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Ser Twohearts, I hope you will not become one of the small army of relic hunters going after a mythical time ship.”

He was so formal. She probably should have laughed at his Time War joke. She was used to soldiers -- she was used to _mates_. He showed her his grandmother’s boat and he ate dinner with her, but she was still Ser Twohearts to him.

“Like you said. It’s just a bedtime story.” She took out her credit reader. “Let me pay my relic fee.”

*

The one who heard my call draws closer. Two hearts beat. It is not one of my sisters, it is a companion. I am too weak to hold the signal for very long, and I am too weak to read their signature, to see if it is one I know. But I call. I call.

*

Horne had a large triple-secure impound for larger artifacts people brought in. For a fee he would hold them there until relic hunters made it downriver to Capital and up the space elevator to the station where most of the buyers waited to meet them. Jenny had made two trips up the elevator already. The small pieces she found today she took with her, up to her room. While she thought about Ryner and the counterfeit beacon, attacks by pirates, and timeships, she ran her fingers over one of the curved pieces of metal marked with the shapes and lines. It looked like it might have been the rim of a console. The sensation of it against her fingertips soothed her.

The room overlooked the river, and in the early mornings it was noisy. She was the most comfortable here then, when the noise of a busy working waterfront, the give-and-take of working people, pulsed around her. It reminded her of a barracks. There had been so many times, though, in various companies, when at the height of the laughter, the song, the noise, she had felt alone. She guessed she just wasn’t ever going to be satisfied.

As twilight deepened she pulled on her boots, fastened on her blade and went back downstairs. She leaned against the doorjamb into Horne’s office. “Is there a tavern in town that has good cider?”

Horne looked up from his desk. “Yes, the Ash Sisters, Waterfront Road and Bridge Street. Their food is so-so but their family owns orchards and they press their own cider.”

She nodded her thanks and went out, heading south toward Bridge Street. The streets were quieter, the evening punctuated with shouts and laughter from the barges, whose light made pools on the sidewalk. As she passed groups of people the alternative webbed out around her. She had seen these ripples since she stepped out of the clone box, but they stretched farther here, showing her entire lifetimes.

The Ash Sisters was half full. The sisters had plunked down the rayals for an automated menu-board, even if it was an old one that grayed out every few minutes, but they still had human servers. The place smelled of ripe fruit, cider and fried fish. She saw Jarth where she expected him, in a corner, drinking from a tankard. In the shadow, his one hundred red braids looked like a hood. She walked over and sat at his table.

“I wondered if you would find me,” he said. The tankard hit the table heavily, but his eyes were clear. He wasn’t quite drunk, not yet.

“Knew this would be the place,” Jenny said. “They press their own cider.”

The server stopped at their table, a woman in her forties, with a broad face and smile lines around her mouth. “What’ll it be, Ser?”

“Fried fish cakes and the sweet cheese custard.”

“The custard after?”

“No, with. And a house cider.”

The server brought her a cider. It was crisp, sweet with a nutty aftertaste. When the food arrived she speared a bit of fish cake and dipped it in the custard.

“Yeesh,” Jarth said. “I don’t know how you can eat that.”

“It’s delicious,” she said, savoring the salty crunch of the fried fish with the sweet velvet of the custard. “First things first,” she said. “What happened to your stake?”

He shrugged and tipped up the tankard, draining it. After he swallowed, he said, “In Kres city, on Iolanthe. You know it?”

“In the archipelago,” she said.

He nodded. “There was an upscale city bar. I just went there for the cider. You know, a splurge. A guy at the bar was bragging about how he was getting people double return on their investments in half a planetary year. I was about ready to cash out, but I got… greedy, I guess. I couldn’t help picturing a bigger workshop, a better armory. I thought he was drunk, but I went to his office the next day, and he showed me reports, brochures… testimonials. I invested nearly everything. The Auditors arrested him three days later.”

“Jarth,” she said. “What have I told you?”

“Well, if you’d been there, you could have talked me out of it,” he said. “But you were gone.” He sipped his drink. “I’m getting old, Twohearts. My night vision is going and my knee is creaky. Nothing a suit can’t adjust for, but… it’s time to get out, and I lost everything.”

She took a swallow of cider. “So this job must pay a bonus.”

“A big bonus,” he said, looking down at the table.

She took another bite, knowing if she waited he would say more.

“You know Ryner,” he said.

“I do.”

“He dances right up to the edge of legal, but doesn’t put a foot over, at least not usually. And he does his due diligence. He told us that the Primatio of Octus had intel that the Alliance was sending insurgents into his country on riverboats. So we set up an operation. We boarded a suspect boat, a barge, traveling at night, one Ryner’s informant had identified as belonging to the insurgents.” He flagged down the server and waited until another tankard came, then drank heavily. “As soon as we got on the boat, we knew the whole thing was bad, but by then it was too late. So we scuttled it. And the crew…” He looked away from her and drank some more. “You know what Ryner did to the crew.”

She nodded.

“When I talked to him, at first he said it was bad intel, but I leaned on him and finally her admitted it. There were no insurgents; we were there to create an incident. A distraction, while Ryner searched for something the Primatio thought was on the Alliance side of the border.”

“Why didn’t you walk away?”

“We’d already committed piracy. There’s no walking away from that.”

She sighed and mopped up the last of the custard with the final bite of fish cake. “What’s he looking for?”

“There’s something big that’s never been found. LeDuque, that’s the Primatio, he says there’s a cleft in the Big Relic Peak, about two galsteps from where you were today. He thinks there’s a cave or a tunnel in there that leads to something unique.”

She nodded again. She’d seen the fold in the side of the mountain, taken a look inside the cave, but the signal hadn’t been any stronger there. “That’s in the Alliance.”

“Yes. He’s creating a border dispute as a distraction. That’s what the beacon was about. What did you do with the beacon, by the way?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

Jarth actually laughed. Then it faded. “Twohearts, I know how tough you are, but you might want to walk away from this one. The money’s big and Ryner’s committed now. And--”

“He doesn’t like me,” she said.

“And you’re not working for him now, so there’s nothing protecting you.”

She smiled and put a handful of Alliance rayals down on the table. “Great to see you, Jarth. I hope you’re having a nice holiday, along the water, somewhere peaceful.”

His light brown eyes didn’t waver from her gaze. “Yeah, lulled by the sound of the waterfall,” he said.

“Have a good one.”

“Stay safe,” he said.

“You, too.”

 

 

Bethany Falls

Her night goggles turned the landscape pale green. Jarth, knowing her, had deliberately told her very little; but they were camped on the water and within earshot of Bethany falls. There were two tributaries into the Teagan River; the Inger and the Suchil. She might not find the camp tonight, but she was close. She thought, as she slipped through the fragrant trees, that the signal was the strongest she could remember, but Ryner’s camp was tonight’s objective.

She knew what Ryner had done, or ordered done, to the innocent crews of the two ships he’d scuttled. That needed to stop. She needed to stop him, or at least break his momentum. She could do that.

 _We were so much more_ , her father had said.

They were magicians who said they could travel anywhere in space and time; they were warriors who had killed millions.

Civilians died in war. Jenny knew that. She knew that the people who started wars never cared that civilians died. They didn’t care who was trapped in a city before it was vaporized. They didn’t care who starved or died of thirst. They didn’t care who died of illnesses when the healing centers were gone and the supply systems destroyed, when there was no safe food or clean water.

Sometimes soldiers killed civilians by accident; sometimes you couldn’t trust that the person you killed really _was_ a civilian, but there was a line. There was always a line, and Ryner had crossed it. And her father’s people, blowing up their own planet…

“Your own people,” she whispered.

He had –almost –persuaded her that war was unnecessary, and that peace was the way. And when she had fallen, the projectile meant for his heart piercing hers instead, and he looked down at her, she thought she had seen pride in his eyes as well as surprise.

But he had climbed into his blue box with his women and vanished, even though he knew she had not one heart but two.

She didn’t know why she was thinking of him now.

Something near the shoreline snorfled and she turned her head, weapon at the ready. A pair of glowing eyes studied her, then something splashed into the Teagan. She moved closer to the trees. One of the grazers coming up to drink. There were no large predators in these mountains.

On the other side of the thick grove of trees ran one of the deep, narrow tributaries, the Suchil. She was less than a galstep from it, the waterfall faintly thundering in the distance to her left. She could hear it, feel it, the beacon, but she needed to concentrate on other things right now, if she was going to slow down Ryner. If she couldn’t accomplish this by stealth she would have to fight, and some of Ryner’s people she still considered friends.

Most of Ryner’s people liked her, actually. She thought, originally, that Ryner’s dislike sprang from envy, but eventually she decided that he just didn’t like her because she was different.

*

The one who hears my call is so much closer. I can read the energy signature of this one, and I am confused. It is the companion of my most rebellious sister, she whose joyous adventures filled _me_ with joy as well. Some called her companion the Doctor, and some, the Mad One. If the Mad One is here, then my sister is dead, but even at this distance I know something is not right. The signature is there, but none of my sister’s golden breath is intermingled into that melody, and it would flow and swirl through each cell. This one has the signature of the Mad One, but they show no sign of the matrix, the time vortex. I do not know how this can be. Still I call, and I wait.

*

Scraps of light shone through the leaves and Jenny dialed down the goggles. She turned east following the light, reviewing what she knew of Ryner’s sentry configuration. She could feel the signal like a vibration in her bones, closer and stronger than ever, up near Bethany Falls. It was the clearest she had ever felt it, but she knew that off to her right, along the eastern shore of the Suchil, was Ryner’s camp. She knew about where Ryner’s lookouts would be; she knew Ryner. She touched the controls on her suit, setting them to Amphib, and waded into the Suchil.

Like the water, ripples of alternatives spread out around her. Jarth had always said, “We think in a line, but Twohearts thinks in a circle.” That wasn’t right; she thought in interlocking circles. In battle, it served her, and her people, well. In this moment, there was a ripple where she found a boat, and Jenny followed that ripple.

Cold water rose over her thighs. She wasn’t even to the central channel of the tributary yet. Though smaller than the Inger, it was deep enough and wide enough for a weapons boat, especially one in the old style. She kept wading until the water came up to her chin. She dialed her helm and facemask to opaque and swam north with silent strokes. When she heard the faintest sound of the sentries she fit in her mouthpiece and sank until only her eyes and the top of her helmet broke the surface.

One sentry stood guard, a bored watcher more interested in a bottle of something than the flowing water. Discipline was slipping. Jenny eased past that first obstacle with no difficulty.

The trees were strung with cam-netting to frustrate any Alliance flyers searching from overhead. She had been right; Ryner had one slim, heavily weaponed boat at anchor in the center of the river. If he were working true to form, he’d have two guards on board. She submerged.

Underwater, strangely, the signal was louder.

She swam to the boat. Her bubble trail worried her a little, but there was nothing she could do about it. The water darkened as she moved underneath the hull. She had brought two small mines; she would only need one. All she needed to do was disable the boat. Then she would report what she had seen to Horne. The Alliance could do what it wanted with the intel.

She kicked her way to the stern, closer to the engines. She set the mine and armed it with a few quick taps, then swam underwater north past the stern, angling west toward the shadow of the trees.

When she’d first signed on with Ryner she had realized right away what a good armorer Jarth was, and she’d paid him to modify her suit, customizing it. It made her practically invisible now. She waited in a stretch of darkness while the silhouette of a guard cleared the stern of the boat and walked along the port deck. Once the guard was out of sight, away from the blast zone, Jenny detonated the mine.

The concussion shoved a wall of water at her, carrying her back. On the shore, lights burst on like explosions. “Incoming!” someone shouted.

The boat gave a clanging groan and began to settle into the water like a tired animal.

“Intruder alert!”

She sank and swam northwest for the far bank. Out of range of the light she crouched in the shallows. All activity was centered on the broken boat, which was shipping water and keeling, dropping sideways. Lights stabbed back and forth across the water and one beamed her way. She resisted the urge to duck as it glanced off her rounded helmet and skimmed away. No outcry followed. A dozen people, suited up and armed, swarmed the far shore and the wounded boat.

She climbed out and headed toward Bethany Falls.

Bethany Falls, the Teagan River, the Suchil and the Inger; the names seemed odd after Big River and Crossroads, but she knew that the first batch of families who had settled here had named these things after firstborn children. She supposed it was another way of saying “This is home.”

The motion behind her faded, and her quick-drying suit lived up to its name. She was climbing up the narrow trail to the waterfall when the first projectile whizzed past her ear.

She dodged and without bothering to look back, she ran.

“Twohearts, is that you?” Raze shouted. “I’m bringing you back. Ryner wants to see you.”

She slipped around a boulder and unhooked her sidearm. Raze had little discipline, and he was noisy. Ryner knew that. If Raze was bellowing up the night, it meant there was a quieter tracker as well, using him as cover.

“Dead or alive,” he said, “it doesn’t matter.”

She left the trail and climbed up over a pair of smooth black boulders. From here she could see down the trail, where Raze flickered in and out of shadow. Laying down suppressing fire would only pinpoint her position.

“You shouldn’a blown up the boat!” he yelled. She flattened herself against the rock and waited.

Underneath his yelling she heard the click of metal on stone. The second tracker, off the trail.

She let herself slip down the boulders onto the waterfall side. It was uneven here, the pounding of Bethany Falls surrounding her. Below her, the rocks were slick with mist. It would be a long, bad fall if she stepped wrong. She climbed down as quickly as she could, until she was above the pool where Bethany Falls churned the green-blue water into moonlit white.

Another projectile tugged at her arm. The night lit up like a sun. Spikes of pain drove into Jenny’s eyes. She yanked off her goggles but it was too late. She was functionally blinded by the starburst round.

“You owe me for a boat, Twohearts,” someone said, quieter than Raze but in a voice pitched to carry to her, and closer. She climbed down a little closer to the water.

“Come back up and we’ll talk,” he said.

She fired by sound and heard him curse. She had winged him. Her sight was coming back in waves of glowing retinal-afterimage green.

“We’ll add that to your bill,” he said. “I could see Jar’s conscience bleeding out of his eyes, it was only a matter of time.”

She didn’t bother to answer. He’d been prepared for her. She had to give him credit for that.

Her choices were limited. She scrambled down a few paces and ran out to the overhang above the pool. There were no other escape options. She crouched, and fired again at the figure who peered around the rocks. Ryner ducked back. As she dove for the water she saw him in her peripheral vision. He stood up, holding something in his hand. Air rushed past her and the bluish green pool grew and grew. Water swirled around her as she shot toward the bottom. She arched, looking up at the fountain of bubbles where the waterfall met the pool.

Something as huge as a troop shuttle slapped, her, sent her spinning. Her ears throbbed and she rolled. Water crushed her up against the side of the pool, sharp-edged rocks tearing at her. Her mouthpiece pulled loose, bubbles trailing upward like pollen in a high wind. She tried to reach for it but her hands wouldn’t move. The water shivered around her.

He’d thrown a concussion grenade.

The unsettled water shoved her. Her legs ached, but some feeling came back into her hands and she refit the mouthpiece, sucking in deep lungfuls of air. The action made her ribs hurt. She tried to kick, but the water pulled her back and back, some current, an underground river pulling her out of the pool. She kicked and gained a little distance but the pull was too strong. Soon, she’d run out of air. Soon, she wouldn’t be able to breathe. Soon…

 

 

II

(The First Trip)

Gleaming, translucent spans arced across the ceiling. There had been arachnids on Grohe who wove sturdy, curving webs like that. They were so small you couldn’t see anindividual one without squinting, and lived in colonies by the millions. Their webs could hold her weight, could withstand wind, rain and sandstorms. She’d been sidelined there for three days with an infection that slipped past the immunizations, and she’d lain on the cot staring up at the architecture of the webs.

She wasn’t on Grohe. She was on Homecoming. Her ribs hurt. She opened her eyes wider. The ceiling of the cavern looked even, with a smooth finish, artificial. She braced herself and sat up slowly.

Her legs were wet because she was lying half in a pool of water. Overhead the crystalline spars looped back and forth. She tried to stand up and her right hip flared with pain. She looked down. The suit was ripped and her hip was bleeding. She had hit the rocks hard enough to tear the ultra-strong suit.

She unstrapped her emergency kit and spent a few minutes hissing, cursing and dressing the long shallow cut. She had one on the outside of her arm, too, that she could barely reach. She got to her feet, bracing herself against the wall.

In the shallow pool of water in front of her rose a narrow pedestal, topped with a small disk. She hobbled over to it. The thick edges of the disk curved, and marks lined them, arcs, circles and angles like the relics she’d found. She spread her hands on top of the disk and studied it. It was divided up into wedges, marked with images and lines, and it reminded her of children’s board games she had seen sometimes on different worlds. Above the disk hung a circular canopy, perforated with round holes at regular intervals. The whole set-up looked like a control board, but there were no panels, no readouts, no controls. This was not a natural formation, though.

The signal originated here, or near here.

Bracing herself on the disk she looked around. Close to where she had been lying, a passage ran off into the dark. She missed her goggles. It took her a few seconds to find a working light on her suit, but its cone of blue opened up the passage. She didn’t have her sidearm. Drawing her knife, she made her way down the passage.

She lost track of how far she walked. Her sense of direction told her she was heading south-southeast, and the passage inclined slightly but steadily. Was she walking deeper and deeper underground?

Something sparkled in the beam of her light. A staircase, curving around in a spiral, led deeper into the ground… or the structure. Like the first chamber, the floor was smooth, even, finished. The staircase was transparent, and when she shone her light directly on it, it glittered back at her, like diamond. She tested the handrail. When it held, she leaned over and let the beam of light shine down. The light ended before the curving stairs did.

The signal came from down there.

She started down.

After a while, her calves started to hurt and each inhalation brought pain to her bruised ribs. Her hip throbbed. She kept walking past a landing where four catwalks branched off, sparkling like sunlit water in the cone of her light.

She kept moving. The signal grew stronger.

Her light dimmed and dimmed, and she turned it off. She still could see. It wasn’t that the charge had faded, it was that her beam looked weak in contrast to the steady glow below her. It was still a shock when her foot touched down on a floor and there were no more steps. She stood surrounded in a soft golden light, blinking. The room was small, and in its center was another pedestal topped with a disk. This one had no canopy above it. Instead, rising up from the middle of the disk a swirl of colored lights spiraled, billowing and contracting, undulating and shrinking, green, pink as a Homecoming sunrise, pale gold.

Jenny closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, the spiraling column changed as she looked at it, one second a length of twirling silk, one second a cluster of sharp-edged crystals, once a flashing river of gold and green, once a sculpture of wire cubes. Jenny walked over to the console and put her hands on the disk. Something pressed up against her fingers. She lifted her hands and a pair of carved shapes extruded from the surface. One was shaped like a slender humanoid drawing a bow; the other was a bird-shape, an open book in its talons. They looked like game pieces, and now that she studied the surface she saw that it, like the one above, was marked up like a game board.

“What are you?” she murmured, and the column of light answered.

Jenny’s hands spasmed as images and concepts flooded her consciousness. She clenched the game pieces without realizing it. Slow down, she pleaded, and the torrent eased, but it was almost more than she could comprehend.

Gallifrey, megaplanet, the farm at sunrise, the city, its spires, its golden balconies, singing fountains; spinning orbs of star-stuff captured by suns, imprisoned in orbit, whirling, shaping; the pulse of realities, the eternal dance of information; water, air, green grass vast savannahs, time and relative dimension in space; a laughing-gray haired woman no a laughing black haired man no a golden-eyed child running laughing playing, fighting; people in robes whose colors she could not name; wars, some with spears and arrows, some with projectile weapons, some with words, some with fire, explosions, poisons, war to exterminate time and relative dimension in space. She was a in a room, a game piece in her hand. She was in a room and she drank cool water and ate she was in a room she ate travel rations she was in a room filled with toys, board games, games of skill, games of chance, games of risk, games of knowledge, games of strategy, a transparent box that wasn’t, a multi-terrain vehicle in a corner, swords, bows, shields, hammers, sidearms, flying disks, balls, racquets. She was in a room she was in the stars she was on a planet, planets. She was in a room, she drank cool water. She put a salve that smelled like hope and medicine on her arm she was in a room she was in a battle in a war she was in all wars. She was in time and relative dimension in space. _You are a soldier. We were so much more_.

Her beloved ship was damaged. Its sisters flamed across the cold of space like comets and winked out, implosions of love and metal. Her chest hurt. Her hands were weak, her ship was falling. She was fading, and there was not enough energy this time, not enough not enough.

Above her a networked awareness drank the radiance of the sun, tidbits filtered down through the earth to her, and all around her water, water pressing on the ship along one whole curving bulkhead, an underground river.

She shuddered and started up to a standing position. She had fallen, slumped over the disk. The game pieces were gone, but when she touched the surface with her fingertips they began to rise again. She inhaled cautiously but her ribs didn’t hurt as much. She looked down at the cut on her hip. It was mending.

“How long…” She looked at her chron but the figures were flickering so fast she couldn’t get a read. And then she knew the answer anyway; four days.

That didn’t seem possible, but the cut was healing. “Did you do this?” she said.

Instead of a rotating column of light, a sculpture of polished stone, green pink and light gold, rested in the center of the control disk. Jenny didn’t question how she knew what she knew—the room with the cool water, the emergency rations and the healing salve was real. This object, now looking like a stone carving, was what had sent the signal. And Jenny knew it needed to come with her, and so did the disk. The stone needed sunlight.

She reached out with both hands. She thought it would be hard to prise free, but it lifted easily at her touch. She set it down by her feet and looked at the disk. Information flowed into her mind. She knelt, found the contacts on the underside, and released them. She gave the disk a quarter turn and lifted it free.

She held the disk under her arm and carried the heart of the timeship up the stairs. She didn’t have a hand free for her light or her knife, but she wouldn’t need them. She knew just where to go. She knew that, for a very long time, the ship had been bigger, filled with rooms as big as worlds, much bigger than the hole it created, next to the waterfall, when it fell. As it had lain here, wounded, those rooms had faded and the ship had shrunk. She walked along the diamond catwalk to the room with the toys and the multi-terrain vehicle.

With the ship’s help she installed the disk and the stone carving on the control panel of the multi. She looked around at the objects that filled the rooms in drifts and dunes. “Can I take these?” she said, but she knew she didn’t have to ask. She could take whatever she wanted. She knew, too that the heart of the ship was weakening, that it needed sunlight, and that it was using up precious energy to communicate with her.

She grabbed up as many of the portable items as she could carry and stuffed them in the troop compartment of the multi. When she slipped in behind the control panel, her knees touched her chest. She moved the seat back, but the relics took up a good chunk of space. More than likely the thing wouldn’t even start. It had been five hundred years.

She pressed the starter.

It purred to life.

She guided it up to the ship’s outer wall and through a deep rent the ship had not been able to repair. The air changed at once, the sense of it on her skin, as if she’d cleared an airlock. At first she thought she was outside of the ship. Then she knew that she was at its outer bulkheads, and the remaining rooms within were collapsing.

She drove forward and felt the moment when the physical skin of the ship vaporized. She was in a short natural tunnel and through the windows of the multi she could smell the mineral scent of deep rock.  She knew that a subterranean river ran alongside her, but all she could see and smell was stone. As she rolled toward the opening it grew lighter. They came out into a deep defile, a fold in the base of Relic Mountain. The sky above her was a deep blue and the eastern sky glowed pink-orange.

She navigated the multi down the shifting ramp of scree, watching as the sky grew lighter and she could see a glow behind the trees. The heart began to flicker faintly. When the sun cleared the trees, Jenny pulled the vehicle over in a clear spot, parked, and took out the stone. She set it on the roof and sat down next to it, closing her eyes for a moment, letting the warmth spill over her. With her eyes closed, she sensed a presence surrounding her, and when she opened them, it seemed as if the broad leaves of the krya trees reached for the multi. It was an illusion, but it was a comforting one, and the faint scent of cinnamon filled the air.

She waited most of the day. Several flyers went overhead, but they didn’t circle back. She worried that Ryner and his crew were still around, or worse yet, other coverts from Octus. No one bothered her. When the sun began to drop behind the western flank of the mountain, she reinstalled the stone and drove down, stopping where she had parked her skimmer. She was going to have to strap it onto the roof, she thought, but when she opened the compartment to get straps, she saw that there was plenty of room. She loaded in the skimmer. Back in front of the control panel, she adjusted her seat. She had more legroom now.

The heart’s flicker had settled to a steady brightness that looked more like a reflection than a glow. The mountain was quiet. In a little over an hour she was down on the skirts of the mountain, connecting with the road. She braked, staring down at Crossroads where it hugged the river like a toy town.

In the middle of river, north of the city, rode a gunboat. And it flew the colors of Octus.

 

 

III

Crossroads

Jenny clenched her fists. What was going on? She drove down the hills, picking up speed. There were very few vehicles on the road, and before she reached the town she came up to a roadblock. A man and a woman in Alliance military uniforms waved her to a halt. The woman had a sidearm. Jenny had already decided to declare the multi as a relic, which technically it was. But why were they stopping traffic? Was there a war? Would they need her?

Had Ryner done something worse? Her chest tightened as she thought of Horne.

She checked to make sure she had her relic-hunter token and opened the door. Prepared to make the short jump down, she was surprised to step down onto a running board. She stood away from the vehicle, her arms slightly away from her sides.

“ID, please,” the man said, holding out a reader. The woman waited off the side, so her partner wasn’t in a line of fire, one hand casually on her weapon.

He scanned her relic-hunter token.

“What’s happening?” she said, jerking her chin at the river, the gunboat.

“Primatio LeDuque is having a snit,” the woman said. “Insists that Octus citizens on the border need defense because someone sank one of their boats.”

“A pirate boat,” the man said. “Any weapons to declare?”

“Yes,” she said. “This knife. And some antique weapons, if you want to look at them.”

“Relics?”

“I think so. I’ll open up the back for you.” She turned and froze for a nanosecond. The vehicle behind her looked like something you would rent in Capital. The long vehicle gleamed a deep glossy brown, its fenders curving over wide tires. The decorative grill at the front had an undulating, leave-shaped pattern, and shaded windows rose to a tall roof, elegant lines snaking back to long matching fins at the back. She blinked and opened the second door. “There,” she said, and waved at the collection of objects.

“Is this is a new model? Plenty of space,” the man said. He glanced inside, but he seemed more interested in Jenny. “What’d you do to your hip?”

“I fell, climbing. It took me a few days to rest up, and then I had to haul all this out,” she said.

The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. “Your suit looks military.”

“It is,” she said. “Was. I’m retired.”

“Retired from where?”

The woman came over, studying something on her reader. “Twohearts?”

Her hearts started to pound, but she nodded.

The woman glanced up. “Relax, Pym,” she said. “This is Horne’s lodger. He’s put out an alert on you, Ser, wants to be sure you’re okay. I guess you’ve been gone longer than expected.”

“Yeah.” She waved at the wound on her hip. “Will you let him know I’m coming?”

“We’ll ping him,” the woman said.

Pym walked around the multi. “How can I get a rig like this?” he said.

“Uh, it’s one of a kind,” she said.

He stared at her, his eyes narrowing. Then half his face wrinkled up in a wink. “I get it. Prototype, right?”

She winked back.

“Well, it’s a beauty.”

As she started to climb back inside, she said, “What’s going to happen?”

“Octus is going to try to start a war,” Pym said.

“And we’re not going to let them,” the woman said. “Drive carefully.”

She nodded to them and got back inside. She had more headroom now. It was more than the outer shape of the vehicle. The inside was expanding. She thought about the vast rooms in the underground ship, going dark one by one, and she reached up and stroked the stone carving.

She parked in Horne’s back yard. He came out. “Thank the Lady you’re all right,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

“I’m hard to kill,” she said. She got out.

He caught his breath. “You’re injured! Are you okay? Do you need a medico? I kept pinging your token and getting nothing. That never happens!”

She touched his hand. “I’m doing fine. I was pretty deep inside Relic Peak. Are _you_ okay? Have Octus’s soldiers threatened you?”

He spread his hands, then shook his head. “They fired on the bridge. You can see the scarring from the shore. And flyers going over every hour – ours, not theirs. We’re okay here, but it’s tense.”

“I guess it would be,” she said.

“Where in the world did you get this?” he said.

“I’ll tell you later. I have about a hundred relics to declare.”

“A hundred? Was the score worth the injury?”

“I think maybe,” she said. He went inside to get his scanner. Together they went through the collection of relics together.

“Some of this…” he said. He shifted a stack of puzzles made of wood, stone and a substance Jenny couldn’t identify. “These antique puzzles are rare. They’re at least five hundred years old.”

“The weapons?”

“Eh. Not so rare, not so old, but weapons always have their collectors. You’ll do well.”

“What about these?” she said. “I can’t figure out what they’re for.” She picked up a shallow box that looked transparent, its edges carved with fretwork.

“It’s empty,” he said.

Jenny shook her head. “It looks transparent, but it isn’t. It’s an illusion. Can you see my hand through it?”

“You’re right, I can’t.”

She opened the lid. The six slender streamlined shapes had intrigued her before, with their delicately carved fins and lot metallic points. Each one felt perfectly balanced when she had picked them up. “They’re micro-missiles of some kind,” she said. “Although I can’t find where to insert a payload, or find a launcher.” She looked at Horne, who was laughing. “What?”

“Those are darts,” he said.

“I know that. Is there a blow tube or—“

“Not those kind of darts. These are for a game, competitive target practice. You throw them by hand.”

“Like a training exercise?”

“Exactly like, if a training exercise includes ale and wagers.”

“Well, that’s just weird,” she said.

He picked one up and held it. “Whoa,” he whispered. “These are beautiful. These are…I’m guessing about two hundred years old.”

Jenny tried to ignore the rivulet of confusion that trickled through her brain. How could there be two-hundred-year-old darts in a ship that had crashed five hundred years ago? For that matter, how could there be a multi in there? She knew she should understand, but for a moment she couldn’t make the connections. The sureness, the confidence she’d felt up on the mountain began to fade.

“Help me get my skimmer out,” she said. “And we need to register the vehicle too. It’s a relic.”

“Uh, really? Okay.” He leaned into the back, shot her a crinkled-browed look, and stepped into the multi. “Plenty of room to just roll it out,” he said, pushing out the skimmer. “I didn’t know they made these so spacious inside.”

“Well, since you’re in there,” she said, and climbed into the front. “These are relics too.” She patted the stone carving.

Horne was kneeling in the back. The cargo area seemed twice the size of a regular multi. He knee-walked forward and ran his scanner over the stone. “Mmm, no,” he said. “That doesn’t register as a relic.”

“It is, though.”

He fiddled with the setting and scanned it again. “What? That’s weird, now it’s a—no. Nope. Not a relic.”

“What happened?”

“It registered as organic there for a microsecond. Anyway, I can’t scan it as a relic, so, to my way of thinking, it’s not one.”

She sat back in the seat, then turned around to look at him. “Do you remember saying that there was nothing in the catalogue or procedure manual for a time ship?” she said.

“Of course, I…” He straightened up and looked around. “You think… this? You think it’s a… The car’s a time ship?”

“No, not exactly,” she said. She put her hand on the stone carving again. “I think maybe this is.”

“Did you hit your head when you fell, Ser Twohearts?”

She started to shake her head. She reconsidered, remembering the concussion grenade. “I didn’t just slip and fall while I was searching.” She told him about Ryner’s camp and the boat.

Horne sat down on the floor of the multi. “Wow, you don’t do anything in a small way, do you?”

“Did I bring the gunboat?”

He tipped his head to one side. “I’d say yes,” he said. He held up a hand. “I don’t mean it’s your fault. Primacio LeDuque is orchestrating this, and those guys were pirates. You stopped them. But LeDuque seized an opportunity. I’m guessing your friends are back over the border, or off-planet by now.”

“Off-planet, probably. The operation imploded; Rhyner wouldn’t stick around.”

“If you can tell me where you broke their boat, that would help.”

“I can give you those coordinates,” she said, “roughly, anyway.”

“It’ll prove it’s a pirate boat, but not much else,” Horne said. “Dammit.”

She leaned back against the firm cushiony seat. “The gunboat,” she said. “Tell me about it. Do you know about the weapons?”

“For sure a projectile cannon, and probably laser cannons fore and aft, although they haven’t used them. And guns, obviously, but I don’t know how many.”

“The complement?”

“Is that like the crew? I’ve got no idea.”

“It’s right in the center of the river,” she said. “It’d be vulnerable to someone in an amphib suit.”

He folded his hands. “I think that’d be seen as an actual act of war,” he said. “I don’t think we’d walk back from that one. LeDuque’s whole excuse in the first place is that someone scuttled a ship.”

“A pirate ship.”

“I think scuttling the gunboat would only make things worse.”

“Maybe if someone disabled the weapons? Just the cannon?”

“Ser—“ he said. “Jenny. I don’t—I think we should let the politicians handle it.”

“That never goes well,” she said. “Every job I ever took, I took because people waited for the politicians to handle it. Then the politicians send in people like me to kill other people like me. And besides, I’m only theorizing. What if somebody brought Ryner back and got him to give testimony?”

“Even if you could find him,” Horne said, “he’d be a pretty discredited witness. He committed piracy. He killed people, if you believe your friend.”

She thought about Jarth. The company would still be responsible for piracy. “I have to do _something_. What if I secured LeDuque? Then we could —“

“By ‘secured’ you mean abducted?”

“Well… technically, yeah.”

He shook his head. “Jenny. I know you’re a soldier, but I don’t think you can solder your way out of this one.”

“I don’t know any other way to do things,” she said.

He looked around at the relics in the orderly stacks he’d created. “I think you’re going to get to practice doing things as a rich person,” he said. “This relic haul… well, the government fees’ll sting, but you’re going to be comfortably set up for the rest of your life. And if you want to go crazy extravagant, you’ve probably got a good twenty-five years of doing that.”

“I don’t want to go crazy extravagant,” she said. “What are we going to do with all this?”

“I can keep most of it here, but I don’t want word to get out. I’ve never seen a stake like this.This space is secure, but this cache is very tempting.”

“Let’s put it back in the car,” she said.

They climbed out and moved the artifacts back inside. There was plenty of room left on the floor when they were finished, even though the car didn’t seem any bigger when they walked around it. From his slight frown, Jenny thought Horne noticed that too.

The multi locked itself behind her, and she hoped she could get into it again. She followed him into the public room, which was filled with people, two deep at the bar, where the relief server was running himself ragged.

“I didn’t know you were this busy,” she said.

“People come to keep an eye on the gunboat,” he said. “They don’t say so, but that’s what it is.”

She wished him good night and went up to her room.

There had to be a way to get rid of that gunboat, but Horne was right. Anything she could do tactically would exacerbate the situation, and she was only one person.

If she could get to Octus, she could persuade the Primatio to back off. She had already recovered what he wanted. She could offer to sell—she couldn’t even finish that thought. She wasn’t selling him the ship. That would be like selling him her bones while she was still wearing them.

_You are a soldier. We were so much more._

She had seen the Time Lord through the eyes of the ship, dancing, laughing, gaming, fighting their way across the wherewhen. Across space and time. Golden eyed/black haired/gray haired manwoman. If she really were a Time Lord, she could solve this puzzle. She would know what to do. She drifted into sleep.

*

Several hours later she opened her eyes.

“You idiot,” she said out loud to herself.

She got up and slipped into her suit. The stairs creaked underfoot, but Horne did not stir from his room down the hall. She opened the door to the multi and slipped in. She put her hands on the disk and the game pieces rose into place.  “Show me,” she said.

 

 

IV

(The Second Trip)

She overshot the first time and had to go back, or forward. She didn’t know which word fit. If she did it right, that mistake wouldn’t matter. There wouldn’t be consequences from it, because it never would have happened. She thought of the ripples of alternatives she saw; she didn’t know yet exactly where the circle changed, where the decision branched. She rubbed her damp palms on her thighs.

The second time she got it right; the wherewhen was specific and the multi appeared in Primatio LeDuque’s bedchamber. LeDuque sat up, stared, and screamed, “Guards! Guards!”

“They’re here,” Jenny said. She opened the back and pulled his security detail, bound and gagged, out onto the floor.

LeDuque made a dash for an alarm on his bedside table and Jenny aimed her old-fashioned pulse weapon, crisping the button into uselessness. LeDuque flung himself back against the headboard.

“What do you want? How did you…? Leave, leave now and I won’t have you arrested and executed.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said. She put one hand on the roof of the multi. “At least I’m not leaving until you’ve heard what I have to say. Please stop screaming.”

He stopped, panting, staring at her and at the multi. The white ring around his irises narrowed and faded, and she saw his look of panic change to one of calculation… and something else. Something like lust and hunger, with a little bit of a look she’d seen with monks and priestesses, sometimes; a religious look.

“You’re planning to create a distraction and then stage a raid into Alliance territory to find a relic,” she said. “That relic’s already out of your hands. Call off your plan.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You plan to hire the Freedom Force to play pirate and create a border incident.”

He squinted. He eased himself away from the headboard. “Where did you hear that?”

“I know things,” she said. “I know you will never find the relic you want, and so you will call off this plan now.”

“Is that,” he swallowed. He pointed carefully at the multi. “Is that… it?”

“Yes. And you’ll never touch it. So, later this week you’re planning to meet with a mercenary named Elikin Ryner. Call that meeting off. If you don’t, I’ll know.”

He looked at her, as if he’d just now understood her answer to his earlier question. “Do you know what it does? Time and relative dimension in space, that’s what the old documents say. Do you know what that means?”

“It goes anywhere in space and time,” she said.

“I’ll pay you anything you want,” he said.

“No. Do you understand me? Call off the meeting with Ryner.”

“I’ll give you a title and an estate. I’ll put you on my personal council. You can maintain the ship for me. You can—“

“Can you listen?” she said. “I’m a soldier. I know how to kill people. I can go anywhere in time. Do you understand that I’m threatening you? Call off the meeting.”

“Yes, all right,” he said. “I understand what you’re threatening. I’ll cancel it tomorrow.”

“Let’s hear you call it off right now,” she said.

“What? I don’t understand.”

“Call your secretary right now and cancel it.”

“He’s sound asleep! I’ll leave him a message.”

“Wake him up,” she said.

When he hesitated, she said, “ _Anywhere_ in space and time.”

He reached for his speaker and let it chime until a sleepy voice on the other end muttered something. He said, “Illio, prepare an earnest money payment for Elikin Ryner and cancel tomorrow’s meeting.”

 _Tomorrow_. She had cut it closer than she had thought.

The voice on the other end squawked, and agreed. LeDuque disconnected. “You should listen to me,” he said. “You should let me teach you. You don’t know what that is. You don’t know what _they_ were.”

“I do. It’s a time ship, and they were Time Lords.”

“You don’t know the first thing. It’s called a Tardis. I could help you. I could—“

“Not a chance.”

He sat up even straighter. He had lost all his fear. The religious expression was stronger than ever, and she didn’t like it.

“Do you know what you can do with a time ship?” he said.

“I’m getting the idea.”

“Right any wrong,” he said. He stared past her and his voice rose. “Punish any insult, any slight. You could be like a _god_.”

“They were not gods,” she said, one foot on the running board.

He looked at her, startled. She’d bet he had forgotten she was even there. “Well,” he said. “If you found one then there must be others.”

“There aren’t.”

He smiled. “You can’t know that.”

“I can, though. There isn’t another. You need to stop looking, or if you’re going to keep looking, stay on your side of the border.” She turned to get back into the multi, then, on impulse, turned back to him, the words leaving her mouth before she could even think about them. “The nation of Alliance and everything in it is under my protection.”

He snorted. “Some childish gal-credit play soldier? You don’t even know what you’ve found,” he said.

“I didn’t find her. _She_ found _me_.” She shut the door.

 

 

 (The Third Trip)

Kres City

The upscale cider bar in Kres City wasn’t her kind of place at all.

She asked the ship to find a supernova, and they rested there three days, by her estimation, while the ship drank energy and Jenny learned. Now, here she was.  She stopped in the garment district first because something told her a battle suit or her plain under-armor wouldn’t fit the dress code of the place.  She settled on a pale green dress and a string of amber colored beads, a green stone comb in her hair. She felt underdressed without her suit. She didn’t even think she had the right place until she saw the cider offerings. Yes, Jarth _would_ come to a place like this.

He was at a small table near the bar, deep in conversation with two men, both dressed like they had money. One was the investor, she thought, the thief, and the other was a shill. She headed straight for the table and people moved out of her way.

Jarth looked up with an irritated frown that turned into a smile. “Twohearts! Look at you! Dressed up? What’s the story?”

The thief looked at her with a steady gaze. He glanced sideways at the other man, who glanced at his chron, gave a soft exclamation and moved away. Jenny gave the thief a big fake smile and looked around. “Got a chair?” she said.

“Yeah, uh…”

The thief stood up. “Here, take mine,” he said. “I can see you have some catching up to do. Jarth, stop by my office tomorrow. We’ll talk more.” He flashed Jarth a smile. “I can already see your workshop.”

“Thanks, Ciprio. Really.”

“So what’s that about?” Jenny asked, folding her arms on the table.

“Just money. Some investments. Some really _good_ investments. What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone off-planet. Are you re-upping?”

“Nah. I’m relic-hunting on Homecoming, and I made a good score. Thought I’d give myself a little vacation. Now, tell me about these investments.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I know you always worry, but this guy is pulse-proof and projectile-proof. He’s going to show me the details tomorrow at his office. That other guy, the one who had to leave? He doubled his money in less than a planetary year.”

“He just happened to be here,” she said.

“It wasn’t like that. The two of them were having drinks.”

She shook her head. “If it sounds like a miracle, it’s a scam, Jar. You know that.”

“Well, I don’t think this one is. He’s got _brochures_.”

She had to be careful.

“I know how much you want to start that business,” she said. “Will you just do me one favor?”

He folded his arms across his chest and the corners of his mouth turned down. Jarth was hell to deal with when he turned stubborn. She’d have to watch her footing here. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not _stupid_ , Twohearts. I’m doing my homework on this one.”

“I’ve never thought you were stupid,” she said. “I can see that you’re doing all the right things. My favor is, will you think it over for a week? Just a planetary week. If at the end of a week you still think it’s good, then go for it. Prove me wrong.”

“Wait a week?” he said.

“Why not? You said that other guy invested a year ago, right? If it’s so good it’s not going to go away in five days.”

He shifted his jaw from side to side as if he were chewing. “Yeah… okay. Yeah, for you, Twohearts, I’ll give it a planetary week.”

“Great.” She looked around. “What does a soldier have to do to get a drink around here?”

 

 

V

Big River

Jenny didn’t know the word for what the car did, whether it was “materialize” or “land” but she was back in the secure area of Horne’s property behind his house. She climbed out. The sky was starting to lighten as dawn approached.  From here, she couldn’t see the river, so she didn’t know if the gunboat was gone.

Horne came out, a coat over his nightclothes, carrying a pulse-rod. He looked wary and angry but those emotions vanished when he saw her. He rushed toward her and she thought for a minute he was going to hug her. “You’re back!” he said. “Are you all right? Where have you been? Where did you get this car?”

“What’s going on? How long have I been gone?”

“It’s been five days.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Five days, Jenny! I put in a report, and Relic Rescue found your skimmer in the foothills and no sign of you. I kept pinging your token and getting nothing. That never happens! What’s going on?”

“My skimmer? That’s impossible.” She stared at him. “My skimmer is… Oh.” She looked at her chron. The mechanism was useless inside the multi, but now it had settled. She hadn’t navigated wrong. It was an hour after she had left, but the ripples had changed. She hadn’t found a fake beacon or met Ryner, because Ryner had never come here. There had been no fake beacon, no pirate boat and no gunboat.

She said, “I’m all right. Um, how have things been around here?”

“What do you mean? Where did you buy a car? And why? Why didn’t you call me?”

“Horne, please answer a couple of questions for me, and then I’ll answer yours, I promise. Any trouble here, with Octus? Any border problems?”

“Octus is always weird, but nothing out the ordinary. Things are fine.” His voice trailed off, and she saw the skin around his eyes wrinkle.

“But you’re not sure,” she said.

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s just, like the scrap of a dream trailing you after you wake up. I dreamed that there was something bad going on, but, everything’s fine.”

The tinge of uncertainty baffled her for a fraction of a second until she let herself see the currents of timelines that ran out from him in all directions. Now she could _see_ just where the ripples eddied, shifted by her change. “Okay, good,” she said. “I found a bunch of artifacts that need to be catalogued. Do you want to do it now?”

“Now?” He suddenly jerked his head around, looking to the right. Then he looked back. “Right now? It’s barely dawn.”

“I can wait.”

“No, I’m awake now, let’s do it. Why’d you buy a car, though?”

“I didn’t. This is a multi.”

He pointed. “That,” he said, “is a car.”

“It has a changling circuit,” she said.

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“I hadn’t before either.”

He went into the house and came back out with his scanner, and by then she had made up her mind. She probably had made up her mind before then, maybe, given that jerk of his head, but thinking about it too much made her head hurt. He looked surprised. “You didn’t take them out of the vehicle,” he said.

“We can do it inside.”

“Twohearts, is this some kind of a joke?” he said.

“Nope.” She opened the back door. “There’s plenty of room.”

“Okay, I –“ he started to step inside. “This is… spacious.” He ducked back out and looked around. “I… is this military?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“You sure this isn’t a trick?” He straightened up and looked at her. “You’re always so serious. You could trick me easily if you wanted to.”

“It’s no trick, Horne.”

He climbed inside and she slipped into the front. He stood in the cargo area, looking around. “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff,” he said. “And the headroom… Just what is this vehicle?”

“It’s a relic,” she said.

“Okay, now I _know_ you’re joking,” he said. “I recognize the style and the color. This hasn’t been buried in the ground for the Lady knows how long.”

She twisted in her seat to face him. “You remember hearing about the Time War when you were a kid?”

“Sure. I grew up on those stories.”

She nodded. “This is a time ship.”

He spread his hands and laughed. “Okay, you got me.”

“Seriously. Come up here and sit next to me.”

He slid between the seats and sat down, watching her face. She put her hands on the control panel and the game pieces rose out of it. Horne gasped. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t, the ship did.”

“That’s –“

She closed her eyes for a moment to concentrate, then opened them and moved the pieces, setting in the course the way the heart of the ship had taught her. “Here we are,” she said.

“Very funny. We didn’t even move.”

“Open your door,” she said, opening hers to step onto the running board and down onto Waterfront Road.

“What…” Horne stood in the street, his mouth open, staring at the front of his house, at the ship waiting in its sling. “How did we…? I didn’t even feel it move.”

“That’s just the where,” she said. “Wait ‘til you see the when.” She led him past the ship along the side of the house and motioned him to press against the siding. She lowered her voice to just above a whisper. “Look,” she said.

He peered around her. She heard him gasp again and whisper a curse that sounded like a word or prayer. She glanced around the corner to see herself stepping out of the stylish brown car. A moment later Horne, his black coat flapping around the legs of his nightclothes, joined her.

“That’s not possible,” Horne said. “That’s _us_. That’s us, just a few minutes ago.” He took a step forward. Jenny grabbed his arm and pulled him back, just at the Horne in the yard jerked his head around, staring in their direction.

“Stay out of sight. I think it’s bad if they see us,” she said.

“What happens?”

“I don’t know.” She waited. The Horne from the past turned and went back inside. “Come on, let’s go.”

“If we stay, will we meet ourselves?”

“I don’t know. I think so. But we haven’t, so maybe we don’t. And, let’s not.”

“You’re making my head hurt,” he complained as he followed her back to the multi.

A few seconds later he said, “When are we now?” He was a fast learner.

“Two seconds after we left. Just after you got in to log in relics.”

“Right. So let’s do that,” he said. She thought he probably wanted something familiar to do, to adjust to everything that had just happened.

He paused, stroking the crystal box and sighing over the darts. “So, tell me. Tell me everything, if you can without making my head explode.”

“Well, mine hasn’t yet,” she said, and told him everything as she remembered it; the fake beacon, the pirate boat, the time ship, the gunboat. He interrupted her.

“That was my dream!”

“I think, because you were in the time ship before, the first time, even for a minute or two, you absorbed some energy that made you more aware of shifting timelines.”

“If you say so.” He shook his head slightly, stroking a crystal box filled with small personal missiles, that he’d told her were darts from a game. “So, what are you going to do with your incredible wealth?”

“Do I have incredible wealth?”

He finished up scanning in the artifacts. “Yes, you do. The condition these pieces are in, the variety… you’ll make enough to live in complete extravagance for the next twenty years, someplace like Charis or one of the luxury moons.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “Will I have enough to repair a riverboat?”

“You want to get a boat? Are you thinking of going into trading?”

“Not trading,” she said. “I’m a soldier. At second-best, I’m a security expert. I don’t want to buy a barge. I want to buy half an interest in your boat, and get it repaired.”

“My boat? A partnership? Why?”

“Because I don’t think we’re done with the Primatio.”

“But you went back in time and warned him off. The attack never happened… right? The fake beacon, all that?”

“I stopped his plan, _one_ plan. I didn’t stop his obsession, and I don’t think one person could. I think he’ll come nosing back around. He’s trying to convince himself that there’s another time ship, or he’ll try to come after this one, and the Alliance is going to need protection. Crossroads is.”

“Well,” he said. “I’d love it if you could bankroll the repairs, but I don’t know what I bring to the partnership. And I can’t, legally, anyway. I’m a Relic Agent and you’re a relic hunter. It’s –it’s a conflict.”

“You bring your knowledge of boats and river, and the people. You grew up here. You know everyone.”

“Just about.”

“I’m an outsider.” She didn’t finish her thought, that she would always, somehow, be an outsider, because of her two hearts, because of the bond with the ship. “You’re trained in law enforcement. And you work for the government already, so getting any licenses we’ll need to arm the boat should go easier.”

“Arming it? I don’t know anyone…”

“I know a guy,” she said.

“You’re bringing back the River Police, one boat at a time?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Something like that. The multi will fit on the boat, won’t it?”

“We’ll make it fit. And then, will the boat become the time ship?”

She looked around the space of multi’s interior, which already seemed a little larger than it had when they had returned from the past. “I don’t know. I don’t know the dance; I’m just following the steps to see where they lead.” She thought of the huge, ancient trees in the foothills, trees that had drunk the water in which the ship had been submerged; trees who had fed the ship. There was a connection here, and she knew the riverboat was part of it.

“There is still the conflict of interest,” he said.

“Not if I cash this out and cancel my license,” she said, “is there?”

“No,” he said, looking around. “Probably not. Especially not if I resign as a Relics Clerk too.”

“So,” she said, “All your formality. It was because of your job?”

His cheeks turned red. “Yes. We’re supposed to be helpful, but our loyalty is to the government. And I felt that I needed to keep some distance. That all changes, though, if you give up your token.”

He looked around, probably to avoid looking at her. “I think a lot of things are going to change. A River Police boat, and a time ship.” He sighed deeply, turned to her and held out his hand. “I’m in.”

*

I dance through the universe again, with a companion. This one is new, young, but they thirst to learn. Like the Mad One often did, they have brought along a stray, but it that makes them content, then I am content.

Two hearts beat, a bright mind reaches out, and I call no longer. Now I sing. I am home.

*

With all their planning, it took seven months. Horne helped her find the best buyers for her relics. Then she cancelled her relic hunter token and he gave notice as a Relic Agent. She put most her money into safe, unexciting investments, and kept out enough to finish the work on the boat with funds left over.

Jarth, three months into his new business, was happy to arm the boat, and even threw in a modified battle suit for Horne. Horne plunged into the boat repair, working all the daylight hours, sometimes forgetting to eat unless she went out and got him.

And now, with winter coming on and a brisk wind blowing off the Big River into their faces, they stood on the deck as Horne took the boat out of its newly rented slip, ready for a test run.  The tops of the Relic Peaks sparkled with snow.

One hand on the wheel, he turned to her. “You’ve never told me what you wanted to name it,” he said.

“It’s your boat to name.”

“No. I think you can do the honors.”

She stood. In spite of the cold, a golden warmth filled her, coming from the green and pink stone that sat in the car which was parked securely in the stern. It fit there easily. Horne had seen to that. “The Tardis.”

“Tardez?”

“Close enough.”

“That’s different,” he said.

She looked at him and smiled. “It’s a family name,” she said.

  


  
  
  


 

 

 

  


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  
 

 

 

 

 


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